Providing high quality service to customers has become a primary consideration by organizations and companies, such as those in the telecommunications, manufacturing, finance, as well as other service oriented businesses that are seeking to gain a competitive edge in their respective markets. To this end, companies in these sectors spend significant amounts of money to provide a high level of customer service. For example, enormous investments have been made to establish call centers for handling customer inquiries. Traditionally, companies have relied on telephony services to address the customers' needs, e.g., provisioning toll-free customer service telephone numbers for call centers, so that customers can reach their service representatives without incurring cost. However, it is recognized that the convergence of traditional telephony communications and data communications has enabled other cost-effective means for reaching out to customers. For example, with the increasing popularity of chat (i.e., instant messaging (IM)) applications, organizations have started to consider chat-based customer service. However, even though the messaging may be “instant,” the processing time for a service representative to address the customer's problem or inquiry remains somewhat unchanged from that traditional telephony call center model. Consequently, customer satisfaction may be negatively impacted if this processing period is significant. Furthermore, with traditional chat-based systems, the customer service representative has very little control over the user experience of the customer.
Based on the foregoing, there is a clear need for an efficient approach to provide support services over a chat-based system, while enhancing user experience.